As part of Hans Kalliwoda’s PhDArts trajectory, he initiated and organised a symposium titled ‘The Inner City as Nature Reserve!’ This avant-garde and visionary symposium brought together academics and experts from diverse fields. Surprisingly, and backed by scientific evidence, urban environments are proving to be more favourable for bees than rural areas. This counterintuitive fact can be attributed to urban settings being a refuge for bees amidst challenges like polluted water, pesticide use, monoculture, and habitat destruction.

Bees, once abundant in the countryside, have been compelled to seek sanctuary in the cities due to these adverse conditions. In 2014, the BeeCare symposium ‘The Inner City as a Nature Reserve’ addressed this issue holistically. An interdisciplinary team including ecologists, sociologists, and policy experts aimed to tackle the challenge of saving the diverse wild bee species from extinction. The key insight was treating these bees as refugees in need of sustenance and shelter, a concept coined as ‘RefuBee’. This perspective shift is crucial for their conservation.

Photo: with Jolanda Maas (VU), Tetje Falentijn (Landschap Noordholland), Jeroen v.d. Sluijs (University Utrecht) and Johnas v. Lammeren, PvdD (Amsterdam Party for Animal rights)